Henry Clay Frick spent the last three decades of his life building a wall. It was a magnificent wall, made of marble and Vermeer and Rembrandt, a garden court with a fountain, and a bequest of $117 million left to the American public. But a wall is only as good as what it is built against, and what Frick was building against was a single week in July 1892, a week that had written a sentence about him into the American record that no amount of money could erase. In 1889, Frick was the chairman and operating control of the largest steel concern in the country, the Carnegie Steel Company, a partnership he had entered into with Andrew Carnegie seven years earlier.
The division of labor was precise. Carnegie owned the name, wrote the essays, and gave the interviews. Frick ran the operation, met the payroll, and dealt with the men. It was an arrangement that had worked for a decade, and it meant that whenever something had to be done that could not be written about admiringly, there was never any question which partner would do it.
The Homestead Works on the Monongahela River employed roughly 3,800 men. Fewer than a quarter of them belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the strongest craft union in America. Their contract was due to expire on June 30, 1892. In 1889, those men had already accepted substantial cuts to their tonnage rates, leaving them paid below the rates at competing works a few miles away.
In the spring of 1892, the company came back for more. The union asked for an increase. The company demanded a decrease. Frick, as chairman, brought negotiations to an end.
Through that spring, the mill ran hard and banked inventory, stockpiling steel so the company could survive a long shutdown without losing customers. A company caught off guard by a strike improvises. A company that spends the spring building a reserve and the summer building a fence has not been caught off guard by anything. In the last days of June, something went up around the steel works.
It took less than a week to build. It was three miles long, twelve feet high, made of solid board, with barbed wire strung along the top. Behind it were water cannons aimed outward, and towers cut with slits for rifles. The men who were standing on the wrong side of it named it within a day.
They named it Fort Frick. On July 1, the lockout began. Thousands of men were shut out of a mill in a town where the company also owned the houses they slept in, and men were put out of those houses too. Andrew Carnegie, whose name was on the mill, was in Scotland, four thousand miles away, while his chairman conducted the operation.
What Frick did next he did in the dark and by water. The river was the one approach the town could not block with a picket line. On the night of July 5, three hundred men hired from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were put aboard two specially fitted barges. Before dawn on July 6, a tugboat began towing them up the river toward the works.
The town found out before the barges landed. Someone downriver had seen them and ridden ahead. By the time the tug reached the mill’s pumping station, the riverbank was not empty. What happened between then and late afternoon is one of the most heavily documented days in American industrial history.
Ten men were killed and sixty wounded. Of the ten, seven were workers and three were Pinkertons. By late afternoon, the hired men had surrendered. More than three hundred of them were taken prisoner and marched out of town.
The barges were looted and burned at the water’s edge. The company had lost the day completely. It did not lose the strike. Four days later, at Frick’s request, the governor of Pennsylvania sent the state militia into Homestead.
They arrived on July 12, took the high ground, surrounded the works, and held both. Under military protection, the mill reopened with replacement workers. The lockout held through the summer and through the autumn. In November, the Amalgamated Association gave in.
Between 1892 and 1895, union membership in the industry fell from roughly 24,000 to 8,000. Steel, the defining industry of the American century, was effectively closed to organized labor. It stayed closed for twenty-six years. The arithmetic of that summer is documented on the website of the museum Frick himself founded.
The infamous Homestead Strike of July 1892 in which 10 men were killed and 60 wounded appears there in the official account of the life of its founder. One fence, one morning on a riverbank, twenty-six years. In the thirteen months that bracketed that summer, something else happened to Henry Clay Frick, something that appeared in no history of the strike and is filed today in a Manhattan archive under his wife’s name. It happened twice.
His daughter Martha Howard Frick was born in 1885 and died in 1891, one week before her sixth birthday. The family’s archive records the cause in a single clinical phrase: a prolonged illness. Adelaide, Frick’s wife, kept two boxes filled with nothing but letters of condolence for that child. They are cataloged, shelved, and preserved to this day.
Then in 1892, Adelaide gave birth to a fourth child, named for his father. Henry Clay Frick Jr. lived a matter of weeks. Over thirteen months, Henry and Adelaide Frick buried two of their four children.
On July 23, 1892, seventeen days after the barges, a man named Alexander Berkman walked into Frick’s office in downtown Pittsburgh and shot him twice, then stabbed him with a sharpened steel file. Berkman was an anarchist with no connection to the union or the men at Homestead. He acted on a political theory of his own. He received twenty-two years and served fourteen.
He also, in a single afternoon, handed Frick the only thing the man could not buy that summer: public sympathy. A national press that had spent two weeks describing an industrialist who fenced his own workers out now had an industrialist shot at his own desk. Frick survived. While he was still in the building, before he was taken home, he made a statement.
I do not think I will die, but whether I do or not, the company will pursue the same policy and it will win. In the previous year he had buried a daughter. In the previous seventeen days, ten men had been killed at a property he controlled. Within weeks, he would bury a son.
He recovered through the autumn. The mill reopened. The union broke in November. Carnegie came back from Scotland.
Frick, forty-three years old, with a wife who had stopped writing about herself, two children living, two children in the ground, and a name that would appear in American schoolbooks for the next century attached to a single week in July, began to buy paintings. He had bought his first pictures in 1881, the year he married. For a decade, it was the ordinary collecting of a wealthy provincial industrialist. Then something changed.
By the mid-1890s, he was acquiring new pictures at a rate of about one a month, sustained for years. Around 1900, his taste turned decisively toward eighteenth-century English portraiture and seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Rembrandt. Vermeer, eventually three of them.
Van Dyck, repeatedly. In 1905, he moved his family from Pittsburgh to New York. In 1913, he began building the container. The site was the block front of Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Streets.
The architects, Carrère and Hastings, were not instructed to design a home that might one day be adapted for the public. They were instructed to design from the foundation up a house arranged for the display of art and for public access to it. Inside, the arrangement was not accidental. In the living hall, two portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger hang on either side of the mantelpiece.
On one side, Sir Thomas More, painted in 1527. On the other, Thomas Cromwell, the man who engineered More’s destruction and sent him to the scaffold. Frick put them there himself, facing each other across the fire. They have been facing each other ever since.
Henry Clay Frick died on December 2, 1919, at sixty-nine. His will was read that week. Of the entire estate, fifty-six percent, or approximately $117 million, was to be devoted solely to the interests of the general public. The Fifth Avenue house, everything in it, and every painting on its walls went to the public as a museum with an endowment of $15 million attached.
A sixteen-gallery museum on Fifth Avenue opened its doors in December 1935 and has been open more or less continuously ever since. Millions of people have walked through that house. The endowment held. The paintings were never sold.
Everything he promised to give, he gave. But the money had failed at exactly one task. It had not been able to buy back the fourteen days between July 6 and July 23, 1892, or the sentence about him that those fourteen days had written into the American record. He left the remaining sixth of the estate to his family.
And to one member of that family, he left something that appears nowhere in the will, that carried no endowment, and that could not be declined. She was thirty-one years old. Her name was Helen Clay Frick, now the wealthiest unmarried woman in the United States. She never married.
She would live another sixty-five years. What Helen Clay Frick did with her life was enormous. She built the Frick Art Reference Library, which grew into one of the great research collections of Western art on earth. She endowed art history at the University of Pittsburgh.
She built a second museum in Pittsburgh on the grounds of the house where her sister had died. She funded vacation housing for textile workers, wildlife preserves, and historic villages. She was also doing one other thing continuously for sixty-five years. She was holding up the wall.
Every time her father’s name came up in a way she considered wrong, she moved. Letters, pressure, money, lawyers. In Christmas of 1964, when she was seventy-six, somebody gave her a book called Pennsylvania, Birthplace of a Nation, four hundred pages of general state history written by Dr. Sylvester K.
Stevens. She read it. On page 226, she found a passage about her father’s coal operations. It described the building of a monopoly, the breaking of unionization efforts, the use of immigrant labor, wages cut to $1.
60 a day, and mines that lacked safety equipment. On the same page, she found a second passage about company houses, which the book called shoddy wooden shacks without sanitary facilities let out at high rents. And on page 209, she found one sentence. The power of the union was broken in the bloody and disastrous Homestead strike in 1892 by stern, brusk, autocratic Henry Clay Frick.
Three passages out of four hundred pages. In 1965, Helen Clay Frick sued the author. Pennsylvania’s libel statutes at that time still carried language reaching material that tended to blacken the memory of the dead. She asked for an injunction to stop the distribution of the book.
The case ran for years. On May 25, 1967, the court dismissed the complaint. It held that publication could not be restrained, that the constitutional protections of speech applied, and that Henry Clay Frick, a prominent public figure at the center of one of the great industrial controversies of the nineteenth century, fell squarely within them. It held that a relative cannot recover for the defamation of a person who is dead.
And it made one further finding. It found the statements to be substantially true. Seventy-five years after the barges, a judge had read the wall and found nothing behind it. Helen Clay Frick was seventy-eight years old when the ruling came down.
She lived until 1984, dying in Pittsburgh in her ninety-seventh year. The library she built is still open. The art history program she endowed is still running. The second museum still receives visitors most afternoons.
None of it was ever the assignment. The assignment was three sentences in somebody else’s book, and she lost. There was no appeal that could reverse the finding because the finding was not really about her father’s reputation. It was about the accuracy of a description, and the description was accurate.
The house on 70th Street is open. The Vermeers are on the walls. The Holbeins are where he left them, still looking at each other across the fire. The garden court runs its fountain, and the people who walk through it on a Tuesday morning have most of them never heard of a milltown called Homestead.
And a few doors along the same block, in the library his daughter built, two boxes hold nothing but the sympathy of strangers for a six-year-old girl. Cataloged, climate controlled, available on request. Everything under one roof. The paintings, the letters, and the sentence.
Because the museum tells them anyway. Ten men killed, sixty wounded. He built the wall himself.
He also, in the end, wrote the sentence on it.